Modern Day Pacifiers

What is a pacifier? 

A pacifier is anything used to soothe, comfort or calm. Whether that’s an actual object, (like the baby one), or something symbolic that we utilize to ease pain, make us feel safe, or silence the noise in our minds. 

Modernized Pacifier 

Babies cry because they need stimulation and instead of taking the time to stimulate them, we overstimulate their little minds with consumption. 

Our phones, television, youtube. Anything to quiet the cries of a growing mind. 

This is what I considered to be Modern Day Pacifiers. 

Nowadays it’s normal to see an adolescent with a phone at the age of 8 years old. Which completely blows my mind. 

I was in the middle of 5th grade when I got my first phone.  Even then there were restrictions. 

Unfortunately, times have changed. The younger generation is being exposed to entirely too much. 

They have the world at their fingertips. The knowledge of good and evil in their hands and it’s killing their subconscious minds. 

Everything is so easily accessible and instead of children learning things gradually, they are being force-fed pain and ways of life from a young age. 

Perhaps that is why so many of them fall into depression.

Because they are inspired to be like who they see when they consume the world. 

Because they don’t fully understand what they are seeing or being taught. 

Their fragile innocent minds were never supposed to see, to hear, to know. 

It was too soon, it is too soon. 

Who’s Teaching Our Babies? 

Parents aren’t teaching their children anymore, social media is.  

Parents have stopped teaching their children how to navigate this twisted world. The real lessons about life?

They’re left to figure it out on their own. In the only way they know how. 

What has the world come to? And where will it go from here? 

It is detrimental to the human race to have so much knowledge. That is why I believe it is important to learn things little by little. 

Coping = Consuming

For today’s youth, imagination is almost foreign, something they barely recognize. 

We see the younger generation “play” outside, but their new way to play is by making videos while still consuming the world in the presence of their friends. 

Because consuming is how they were taught to cope with their emotions; behind and through a screen. 

Humans don’t know how to socialize anymore because it’s more convenient and far more acceptable in this time to do it on a device. 

But definitely not a phone call, that causes too much anxiety right? We all prefer to text. That way we can consider what mask we should wear. 

It’s a bit harder to do that in person isn’t it? 

it gets hard trying to pretend to be someone you aren’t when it's a raw and vulnerable time, like being face to face. 

Coping Through Consumption vs. Imagination

I remember my grandparents' front yard turning into a tree house and the grass was an open body of water. 

I definitely imagined it, but it has been a core memory for me.

When we were younger we dealt with our hardships with imagination and daydreaming.

It kept us young.

Despite mommy and daddy going through a divorce we had things to distract our minds and protect our innocence. 

We weren’t just handed a device that held everything on it. 

Have you ever gone through a break up and suddenly your For You Page is suddenly flooded with sad things as if it just knew. 

It makes the situation worse because you cannot get out of your head in a healthy human way. 

That is how the new generation deals now. So imagine their baby feelings being multiplied because of the media. 

We as big grown adults can’t even deal with that half the time.

So imagine the babies… 

Knowledge or Lack Thereof As A Means To Control You 

Knowledge wasn’t a necessity for survival until it was… until society made it one. 

If you don’t have knowledge, you are easy to control. 

If you don’t question things, you are easier to control. And if you never challenge the Master Plot, you are the easiest. 

Think about it— those in power know everything and we know nothing.  That’s what truly makes them powerful; knowledge of all things. 

This knowledge is what allows them to control us over and over again. 

Avoidance leads to dissonance.

Most of us feel lost and never satisfied because everyone has been wearing a mask since birth. 

We never learned how to be okay with just being ourselves. 

We are learning our identity through what we see, what we listen too, instead of our own lived experiences. 

Modernized pacifiers keep us distracted and entertained, but it will never nurture us. 

It’s easier to control a bunch of babies, then it is to control a bunch of adults right? That’s why pacifiers have been modernized. They keep us small. 

It’s easier to control people who don’t know their identity because they are obsessed with the image of being someone else. 

How can we focus on what truly matters if we are always looking down? How will we hear God if we fill our ears with noise and lies? 

We never learned to sit with the discomfort of life and our thoughts. Why is that? 

We tend to not think about things that challenge what we already believe is true because it makes us feel… uneasy. 

But if you continue to choose to sit in a pool of denial you will drown. 

With these Modern Day Pacifiers, we have become habitual avoiders. 

We avoid our own problems, we avoid the world around us and we suck on our binky so we can stay “safe” and stay distracted from truth. 

Allowing your young child to utilize mass media and consumption daily sets them up for failure. 

They will never succeed in a world where they are brainwashed into becoming just like those in higher places. 

They lose their innovation, their ability to create and be who they were meant to be. 

Habits are hard to break, especially those that are subconsciously curated. 

Modernized Pacies for the Adults

As we step into adulthood, these habits don’t just disappear. They are embedded into our day to day lives. 

When we experience any slight inconvenience or things that aren’t ideal, we turn toward our guilty pleasures because once again, we are habitual avoiders. 

Some of us enjoy smoking weed (me). Some of us drink. Some of us shop. But where did these habits come from? The things that we consumed. 

I personally don’t even enjoy smoking. I like feeling high, I'll admit. But the taste— and knowing that it’s slowly killing me — makes me realize I don’t truly enjoy it.

 I just became an addict to too much consumption. And that alone led to other habits. 

What I'm getting at is, we don’t even enjoy half of the things we do. Possibly because these habits don’t align with our truest selves.

We blatantly saw someone else say, do, or try. So we did the same. 

Time For Growth

We don’t even realize that we have subconscious trauma because it is caused when you aren't conscious, when you aren’t paying attention. 

Imagine the small internal killers that come with that and how it is affecting you, mentally and physically.

Perhaps it is time to spit out our pacifiers. Because when comfort becomes a habit what do we lose in the process? 

With love always, 

Nyasia Davis